and I can finally say I finished listening to all my data! It was definitely one of the more tedious aspects of this research project and there was absolutely no way around it. My study ended up having 35 participants, each providing data for 45 words. Each participant’s sound file took at least 30 minutes to listen through (for those of you keeping track, that’s 17.5+ hours of listening to made up words) so this was an incredibly daunting task. Chugging through everything took a lot of breaks, some encouragement from my advisor, and a considerable amount of ‘sound free time’ after everything was finished.

For the first week of trapping, we first retrieved some empty traps that were left in the field. We decided to be begin by making more traps first. We decided to make all pin style traps. Our first trapping site was close to the Population lab. We set out 9 traps. For the first few days of pre-baiting, due to disturbances by raccoons, the traps were flipped and 3 mice were trapped. During the trapping session we caught only one mouse. One of the traps we set out was actually ripped out of the ground stake and all, pins removed, trap dismantled, and dragged 10 yards through brush. This made us realize that staying in this location was not going to work out. This raccoon disturbance, along with the chances of depleting the population for winter trapping, forced us to move to trapping in woods near campus adjacent to Matoaka lake. This move was interesting because we did not know of there was a destructive raccoon in these woods. So before we officially started trapping, I set out 8 just Sherman traps to see if they would get disturbed. The next morning, I checked the traps and not only had the traps not been disturbed, but I had caught a mouse! So the area was looking promising. So we took out all the traps in the Population lab woods and brought them all to Matoaka woods. We started out on the other side of the woods from where I set out just the Sherman traps. We set down the traps with the raccoon deterrent tubes since they proved to catch mice and prevented the traps from being disturbed. The area was more open and seemed to hold a lot of deer. We also simultaneously ran just Sherman traps near the location where I did a practice run. We ran two trapping locations simultaneously from then on. After the first week of trapping in the two locations, we ran 2 sites in each location. We staggered the schedule to that we would move them at different days. At the peak of the trapping season, we ran upwards to 38 traps simultaneously at different staggered schedules. The tubes were used on one side of the woods and just Sherman traps were being used in the other side of the woods. We didn’t mix Shermans with the tubes because in case there was a raccoon, it wouldn’t try to continue trying to get inside the trap and possibly figure it out faster than if it was just tubes. By four sites at each side of the woods, we had started to run out of viable trapping locations. So we took out all of our traps from both locations So we decided to put just Sherman traps in one location located at a different trail. After placing 20 Sherman traps for one pre baiting night, we saw that there was a very clever raccoon in the spot where we were trapping. One trap was completely dismantled and all of the traps were disturbed. However, we also caught two mice in one night. So since it was an obviously good location, we decided to put the tubes there. 5 mice were caught in one night and six in total. We caught a total of 39 mice. Overall a good trapping season.